Yeah, yeah, we all know the Fox News Channel is hardly an accurate or impartial news source and is practically an official wing of the Republican Party (or is the GOP a wing of Fox News? Who knows anymore), but rarely is one of their employees so blatant about it as Dick Morris. The former Clinton adviser who Judased his way to right wing blowhard stardom and a pundit gig at Fox recently auctioned off a guided tour of the Fox News studios to benefit the Republican Party of Lake County.
Lets imagine that Riptide here auctioned off a tour of New Times HQ to benefit, say, the reelection of Rick Scott. Now granted, we'd never do that and that'd probably only go for a bid of smaller than our cover price of $Free.99, but you probably wouldn't trust us to cover state politics, would you? Or let's imagine the Miami Herald let Glenn Garvin and Dave Berry offered up a guided tour of its newsroom (sure, it'd be depressing, but whatever) to benefit some libertarian group. It'd be a journalism scandal.
Put simply, news organization are not supposed to let their offices be used as the site of political fundraisers. Yet, that's exactly what Morris did.
According to Media Matters, Morris was the keynote speaker at the Lake County GOP's March 9th Lincoln-Reagan Day Dinner.
As a pundit he's not held to the same standards as actual journalists. Pundits and commentators are often working on and advocating on behalf of the election of members of their preferred parties. Is it right? That's up to you to decide. Is it unusual? No.
What makes this troubling is that he auctioned himself off as a "personal tour guide for a visit to Fox News in New York." The package went for $6,000.
Media Matters decided to poke around, and the event page on the Lake County GOP's website was taken down. Here it is saved in Google's cache.
"FoxNews has no involvement in this auction nor have they either approved or sanctioned it," Morris responded when questioned by Media Matters. "It was simply a private, personal offer of a personal meeting in NYC and a tour of the Fox studios."
Fox News' executive vice president didn't reply to Media Matters.
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